Internet Explorer Opens a Blank Page with a Placeholder Icon Instead of a .pdf File in Adobe Acrobat Reader

Internet Explorer may display a blank page with a placeholder icon instead of displaying a Portable Document Format (.pdf) file with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

This behavior occurs because the uniform resource identifier (URI) to the .pdf file does not end in ".pdf" (for example, the file is opened through script or the file is dynamically generated), and the content-type header (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions [MIME] type) that is returned by the server is "unknown/unknown" or no content-length header was returned. Note that previous versions of Internet Explorer that support Netscape-style plug-ins may open the .pdf file without a content-type header.

To work around this behavior, right-click the link to the .pdf file, and then click Save Target As to save the file on your computer. After you do this, you can double-click the locally saved .pdf file to open it in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

To resolve this behavior, contact the Web site author or administrator. Web site authors or administrators can resolve this problem if they configure their Web servers to send both a content-type header (MIME type) of "application/pdf" for .pdf files and an appropriate content-length header. (For information on doing this, consult the documentation for the Web server that is in use.)

To add or modify MIME types on Microsoft Internet Information Services 4.0 or 5.0, please see the following Microsoft Web site: For information on HTTP headers, see the following Microsoft Web site:

This behavior is by design.

For additional information about this behavior, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: